Hmmm

I love this Taylor Mali poem. I have, however, truncated it to include only the parts that I feel are so uncannily applicable to my life today.

Time and Tears Enough

If all of this were happening…
If this were your first Christmas alone…
wouldn’t you expect broken glass to bloom at your feet?
Little flowers of destruction
bursting like the blossoms of shattered flutes
sown in the springtime of a hardwood floor.

Wouldn’t you expect chaos for a time?

When things break,
the jagged pieces draw blood.
This, at least, makes sense.

But there is time, and tears enough.

So you wait and you cry,
and you cry and you wait.
For as long as you want.
Or as long as it takes.

-Taylor Mali

:::headdesk:::

So let me just get this out there for the world to know: I’m a dumbass. It’s official. According to the Graduate Management Admissions Council, I am a fucking idiot.

I failed. Completely failed my GMAT by ten points. I needed a 500; I got a 490. Because of the math.

So, there will be no graduate school for me, no tuition reimbursement checks for my parents to live on, no financial aid residuals to help pay off my debt. No promotions in the future, no salary increases of any meritable size or value, no climbing the corporate ladder. I am, right now, as far as I will ever go.

And I want to cry.

New Series: Happiness Is…

In an effort to lift my spirits, I shall begin yet another new series wherein I shall list one item that epitomizes life’s little pleasures that altogether make up what we generally refer to as happiness.

Submission the first:

Happiness is. . .

. . . a bag of 120 Pixy Stix found at Wal-Mart for only $1.50

Difficult Confessions: Paradox

4. If he touches me, I’ll die; If he doesn’t touch me, I’ll die.

My Own Silence

I pass the hours like an inmate, performing the tasks associated with and necessary for survival from one day to the next and staring from where I sit at a world that exists without me, forgotten. I pace in frustration around an invisible perimeter of glass that separates me and those outside. The familiar stagnant air underwhelms the lungs which I have to force to function.

Remember to breathe… inhale… now exhale…

If I must will my lungs to breathe, why then can I not will my heart to cease its unnecessary beating?

…that the bell jar, with its stifling distortions, might descend again?

It’s strange to think that I might never recover, when I have, in fact, done just that so many times before. Yet with each passing year I lose a bit more patience with the routine. Each day a little more sadness is replaced by anger.

All day, I was convinced I was going to die. Everytime I got into my car, I felt with a startling alacrity that it was the last time I would do so, and was not disturbed. Even now, I sit and write with a clear certainty that my hours are near an end, not by my hand but by something unseen. Were I panicking, I would call it a panic attack. As it is, I call it simply wishful thinking.

Today I had a conversation with myself wherein I listed myriad reasons to live, reminders of my own success in achieving my goals, affirmations of righteousness for the path I’m on, and a robust list of people who love me. Why is it so easy to forget? Why, with so much to live for, is it so excruciatingly difficult to draw one more breath? And why haven’t I cried?

In the end, it goes no further than this: today, as in the past, I will prevail, and I will emerge stronger than before. I will find myself, in a year or so, right back here in this strangely welcoming place of muted colors and willful isolation, and I will wonder why. And I’ll walk in the park and watch the leaves fall and write nonsense in my journal. And then, one day, it won’t be nonsense any longer.

To the person in the bell jar, blank and stopped as a dead baby, the world itself is the bad dream.  ~Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar

Relapse: I Hate Blue Jeans Fridays

And I don’t feel guilty, like I thought I would. Instead I feel lonely. I feel lonely because a wonderful man just asked me to share a movie with him and I declined because when he asked I realized that there’s only one person with whom I want to share a movie or anything else in this world: the one person with whom I never can.

Difficult Confessions – Retrospection

3. I do things I know are wrong, even though while I’m doing them, I’m screaming in my head, “THIS IS WRONG!”

And another thing…

I’m tired of feeling guilty about not wanting to be a wife or mother. I don’t berate or harass those who wish to get married or have children, so I expect the same treatment. Lots of times over the years I’ve told people that “oh, I might decide I want kids someday, I can see the appeal,” or “if I found the right man, I might consider getting married.” It’s bullshit.

I don’t want kids. Never have. Hell, I don’t even like the process involved in becoming pregnant.

I don’t want to get married, even to the right guy, because the “right” guy does not stay the “right” guy for long.  Should I happen to find someone I feel like I need to be around for any considerable amount of time,  I’ll consider joining a bowling league with him.

Questioning Convention

Since I was a little girl, I’ve been fed the idea that women need to get married to be happy. Even still, in today’s more open-minded and slightly more liberated world, people sometimes look at me funny or scoff or slowly shake their heads when they learn that I am 25 years old and unmarried.

Let me break this gently:

I don’t fucking want to get married.

Everything I learn, observe, read, and hear about marriage and relationships repulses me. More and more, I hear my married friends (Jenn and Panda excepted) talk about how much they hate being married, hate their children (which is another story) and how much they wish they could leave, but they “just can’t.”

Then there are sites like True Mom Confessions that just make me lose all faith in humanity, not only the institutions of marriage and motherhood. Some excerpts:

• we only say “I love you” when there are other people around to hear it. I’ve given up
• Some days I’m so lonely I can’t even keep my head up.
• I dont want to wake up one day and wonder why I stayed in this miserable shell of a marriage. But I’m to afraid to leave. So I stay, its safer and easier.

• I hate my lazy, selfish pig of a husband. The only reason I am still here is because I have 4 kids and I don’t have a job. But, how can I get a job if all I am doing is raising his kids while he sits on the sidelines and enjoys it. The lottery is my only way out!!

• I love my kids. Really, I do. But still, I can’t wait until they move out. And they’re only 4 and 5…

• i hate my husband more and more everyday… dont know how much longer i can take it =(

• I let my husband talk me into having kids, assuring me that I would love a baby of ours once it was here. Well, it’s been eight years. Still hasn’t happened. I have been calling suicide hotlines because I can’t take the hell my life has become. I hate my kid, I hate my life, and I hate my husband for getting me into this mess.

• sometime i really hate my kids…as bad as that sounds i do…im sick of hearing them scream, im sick of the whining, im sick of cleaning up after everyone else….and worse of all my bc failed….i DONT want this baby, but i cant get rid of it either. i hate the freakin dr, my husband and everything right now

That’s just part of the  fun stuff there. But that’s nothing compared to True Dad Confessions, which actually makes me sick when I read it:

• I wish she would leave. Then I could be the victim, not the bad guy. Everybody would take my side. Nobody would blame me for protecting my financial interests, as she brought the whole thing on herself. In the meantime, I plan to make her so miserable she will have no choice.

• As amazing as any woman can be, in every possible way, your man will grow tired of you, and want to have sex with others. Many of whom will not be nearly as perfect, in any way, with you.
• You can be the BEST woman in the world. You can have a beautiful face and a smokin’ hot bod. You can be smart and funny and wise beyond your years. You can cook like a gourmet and keep a spotless house. You can bear beautiful children and raise them like a pro. And none of that matters if your man feels he doesn’t get enough sex. Many women seem to think that other things can make up for a lack of sex. Those women are wrong. If your man wants it, and you’re not giving it to him, don’t be surprised when he gets it elsewhere.
• Go ahead, withhold sex when you are mad. I’ll just go down the street and take the workout instructor from behind.

• My wife is a fatty. I love her and would never tell her this…but she’s getting huge! She outweighs me by 40 pounds, if not more!

• I am no longer attracted to my wife’s body now that she is pregnant. I think the bloated belly and all the swelling looks pathetic and just plain stupid. I’d rather have sex with a plain fat chick than preggo.

• My wife still gets up on the weekend, puts on her makeup (after the gym) and makes herself look good for me. I feel bad for guys whose wives only figure this out AFTER the divorce.

No desire to enter into any kind of arrangement that leads to this. And, let’s face it: more often than not (alarmingly often, in fact), this is how marriages end up. No fucking thank you.

So excuse me if I don’t seem eager to lock down a husband. I’m young, self-sufficient, intelligent, and living life exactly how I want to live it. As it stands now, I will never have to say “I want to leave him, but I just can’t,” and no one will ever say about me “I will make her so miserable, she will have no choice but to leave.”

I have no trouble finding companionship when I desire it. So the next person who even hesitates when I say I’m unmarried will get a swift kick in the ass.  Strange as it may seem, I’M HAPPY! I’m probably happier than any married people you know.  And besides, how I live my life is only one person’s business: mine.

I’m back!

I finally got my DSL configured. I’s back online! Woot!

Fun Stuff

If you haven’t checked out Human Age by now, by all means, do so. No end of fun there. Look me up: my cavewoman’s name is Lesil.